I always wondered how the MB dealership service advisors are compensated and how much they make.
Specifically,
- are they paid a fixed salary, or is it based on commission of the amount they bill the customers?
- how much a year do they make?

I know they always try to get customers to get as much work done as possible, so commission must be a part of it.

 

Albeit at a Chevrolet/Geo/Hyundai store (Note that this was 1995). Our pay plan was part salary, and part hourly flat-rate. To be specific, I was paid $2.50 for every hour of labor that I sold from each of my four technicians. If you're not familiar with flat-rate, it's when you are charged a set number of hours for a particular job regardless of how much time the job actually took. Obviously, the technicians (Who are also paid flat-rate) have a lot of incentive to work as fast as possible!

Let's say that a tech has to R & R (Remove and reinstall) a steering rack. Now let's say for this particular car, the rate book (Usually an industry standard book like Chiltons) quotes 5 hours for this job. If the tech can do it in half the time, he still gets paid for 5 hours of work. If the tech was able to complete all of his jobs at half the time (Nice, but hard to do realistically), he would get paid for 80 hours of work for an actual 40 hour work week! You can see why techs are motivated to work as fast as possible!!

Note that with warranty work, the manufacturer pays their own rate which is a heck of a lot more stringent, and while you can still complete the job in less time than it pays, you won't complete it by much less time, and some times it will even take longer than what the warranty pays. Unfortunately, in those cases, you're losing money. Note however that you can get additional time paid if you are able to explain why a particular job took longer than it should have... That's why it's always best to get as much "CP" work, or "Customer Pay" work, as CP rates are much more liberal! Ten years ago Hyundai were a joke, and 95% of our work was warranty, so we struggled big time.

Now my pay plan specifically (Remember that this was 10 years ago), was about $500 a week (I can't recall specifically), and $2.50/hour flat-rate (For each tech, and I had 4). That meant that if my techs "Broke even" and earned 40 hours each, I would get paid $900 gross (40 hours X 4 techs = 160 hours X $2.50 = $400 + $500 salary) for that week. Note that if you're only "breaking even", you're not doing very well. If you were more realistically earning 60 hours per tech, you'd be getting paid $1000 a week (using the same formula).

I assume that you would most likely get a higher base rate and hourly rate because A.) It's 10 years later, and B.) It's Mercedes Benz...

Also, I think that it stands to logic that it's easier to sell CP work (Read maintenance) to a Mercedes Benz customer than a Chevrolet/Hyundai customer, so that would be to your advantage as well. I imagine that a typical MB service advisor makes between $50k-$80k depending on how good he or she is, but that's just an educated guess on my part.

In all, if you can get a job as a service advisor at the right dealership, (And that is critical), it can be a pretty cool job. There's no college education requirement, and you really don't even need to know much about cars, although it helps. If you're at a super-busy dealership (Like mine was), it can be really stressful, as you'll have people screaming at you to get their car fized ASAP. Fortunately, most MB dealerships it seems are more than capable of handling their work loads there.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I couldn't be more specific, but I hope that it gives you a general idea anyway!


Best regards,
Matt

 

Thanks, I'm applying for the officer/dealership in Seattle, Washington. If I get it I'll let you guys in the forum know.

 

They dont get paid enough...go to college instead. Im a doctor and it has paid off. Or you can listen to someone that writes long extended messages on a forum

 

Over the years I employed a large number of Service Writers. Many of them did go to College and had a degree. Most of them earned in a range of $30,000 to as much as $80,000. As in any other profession, it was dependent on your aptitude for the work and how much dedication you were willing to put into it.

Many of these same people eventually worked their way into Service Management where it was possible to earn in six figures while others ultimately moved into General Management and even a couple of them became Dealers.

At the same time I employed as many as four or five CPA's concurrently. I could hire recent graduates for $40,000-50,000 and the career path of the better ones was no more lucrative than the career paths of the better Service Writers.

In today's world, simply having a degree means little without a talent in the field of endeavor.